Добавил:
ivanov666
Опубликованный материал нарушает ваши авторские права? Сообщите нам.
Вуз:
Предмет:
Файл:The Sea Lady
.pdf
THE SEA LADY
the meanwhile the hall-porter hovered on the stairs, praying
for the manager – prayers that went unanswered – and Chatteris fumed below. Then we have a glimpse of the Sea Lady.
“I see her just in the crack of the door,” said the porter, “as
that maid of hers opened it. She was raised up on her hands,
and turned so towards the door. Looking exactly like this —”
And the hall-porter, who has an Irish type of face, a short
nose, long upper lip, and all the rest of it, and who has also
neglected his dentist, projected his face suddenly, opened his
eyes very wide, and slowly curved his mouth into a fi xed smile,
and so remained until he judged the effect on me was complete.
Parker, a little fl ushed, but resolutely fl attening everything to the quality of the commonplace, emerged upon him
suddenly. Miss Waters could see Mr. Chatteris for a few minutes.
She was emphatic with the “Miss Waters,” the more emphatic
for all the insurgent stress of the goddess, protestingly emphatic. And Chatteris went up, white and resolved, to that smiling
expectant presence. No one witnessed their meeting but Parker – assuredly Parker could not resist seeing that, but Parker is
silent – Parker preserves a silence that rubies could not break.
All I know, is this much from the porter:
“When I said she was up there and would see him,” he says,
“the way he rooshed up was outrageous. This is a Private Family Hotel. Of course one sees things at times even here, but —
“I couldn’t fi nd the manager to tell ’im,” said the hall-porter. “And what was I authorised to do?
“For a bit they talked with the door open, and then it was
shut. That maid of hers did it – I lay.”
I asked an ignoble question.
161
HERBERT GEORGE WELLS
“Couldn’t ketch a word,” said the hall-porter. “Dropped to
whispers – instanter.”
II
And afterwards –
It was within ten minutes of one that Parker, conferring
an amount of decorum on the request beyond the power of
any other living being, descended to demand – of all conceivable things – the bath chair!
“I got it,” said the hall-porter with inimitable profundity.
And then, having let me realise the fulness of that, he said:
“They never used it!”
“No?”
“No! He carried her down in his arms.”
“And out?”
“And out!”
He was diffi cult to follow in his description of the Sea Lady.
She wore her wrap, it seems, and she was “like a statue” – whatever he may have meant by that. Certainly not that she was
impassive. “Only,” said the porter, “she was alive. One arm was
bare, I know, and her hair was down, a tossing mass of gold.
“He looked, you know, like a man who’s screwed himself up.
“She had one hand holding his hair – yes, holding his hair,
with her fi ngers in among it.…
“And when she see my face she threw her head back laughing at me.
“As much as to say, ‘got ’im!’
162
THE SEA LADY
“Laughed at me, she did. Bubblin’ over.”
I stood for a moment conceiving this extraordinary picture.
Then a question occurred to me.
“Did he laugh?” I asked.
“Gord bless you, sir, laugh? No!”
III
The defi nite story ends in the warm light outside Lummidge’s Private and Family Hotel. One sees that bright solitude of the Leas stretching white and blank – deserted as only
a seaside front in the small hours can be deserted – and all
its electric light ablaze. And then the dark line of the edge
where the cliff drops down to the undercliff and sea. And beyond, moonlit, the Channel and its incessant ships. Outside
the front of the hotel, which is one of a great array of pallid
white facades, stands this little black fi gure of a hall-porter,
staring stupidly into the warm and luminous mystery of
the night that has swallowed Sea Lady and Chatteris together.
And he is the sole living thing in the picture.
There is a little shelter set in the brow of the Leas, wherein,
during the winter season, a string band plays. Close by there are
steps that go down precipitously to the lower road below. Down
these it must have been they went together, hastening downward
out of this life of ours to unknown and inconceivable things. So
it is I seem to see them, and surely though he was not in a laughing mood, there was now no doubt nor resignation in his face.
Assuredly now he had found himself, for a time at least he was
163
HERBERT GEORGE WELLS
sure of himself, and that at least cannot be misery, though it lead
straight through a few swift strides to death.
They went down through the soft moonlight, tall and white
and splendid, interlocked, with his arms about her, his brow to
her white shoulder and her hair about his face. And she, I suppose, smiled above him and caressed him and whispered to
him. For a moment they must have glowed under the warm
light of the lamp that is half-way down the steps there, and
then the shadows closed about them. He must have crossed
the road with her, through the laced moonlight of the tree
shadows, and through the shrubs and bushes of the undercliff, into the shadeless moon glare of the beach. There was no
one to see that last descent, to tell whether for a moment he
looked back before he waded into the phosphorescence, and
for a little swam with her, and presently swam no longer, and
so was no more to be seen by any one in this gray world of men.
Did he look back, I wonder? They swam together for a little
while, the man and the sea goddess who had come for him,
with the sky above them and the water about them all, warmly
fi lled with the moonlight and set with shining stars. It was no
time for him to think of truth, nor of the honest duties he
had left behind him, as they swam together into the unknown.
And of the end I can only guess and dream. Did there come
a sudden horror upon him at the last, a sudden perception of
infi nite error, and was he drawn down, swiftly and terribly,
a bubbling repentance, into those unknown deeps? Or was she
tender and wonderful to the last, and did she wrap her arms
about him and draw him down, down until the soft waters
closed above him into a gentle ecstasy of death?
164
THE SEA LADY
Into these things we cannot pry or follow, and on the margin of the softly breathing water the story of Chatteris must
end. For the tailpiece to that, let us put that policeman who in
the small hours before dawn came upon the wrap the Sea Lady
had been wearing just as the tide overtook it. It was not
the sort of garment low people sometimes throw away – it
was a soft and costly wrap. I seem to see him perplexed and
dubious, wrap in charge over his arm and lantern in hand,
scanning fi rst the white beach and black bushes behind him
and then staring out to sea. It was the inexplicable abandonment of a thoroughly comfortable and desirable thing.
“What were people up to?” one fi gures him asking, this
simple citizen of a plain and observed world. “What do such
things mean?
“To throw away such an excellent wrap…!”
In all the southward heaven there were only a planet and
the sinking moon, and from his feet a path of quivering light
must have started and run up to the extreme dark edge before
him of the sky. Ever and again the darkness east and west of
that glory would be lit by a momentary gleam of phosphorescence; and far out the lights of ships were shining bright and
yellow. Across its shimmer a black fi shing smack was gliding
out of mystery into mystery. Dungeness shone from the west
a pin-point of red light, and in the east the tireless glare of
that great beacon on Gris-nez wheeled athwart the sky and
vanished and came again.
I picture the interrogation of his lantern going out for a little way, a stain of faint pink curiosity upon the mysterious vast
serenity of night.
Литературно-художественное издание
Original
Herbert George Wells
The Sea Lady
Выпускающий редактор: И. Краснова
Компьютерная верстка: А. Дятлов
Художественное оформление: М. Соколова
В оформлении обложки использованы материалы
по лицензии агентства © shutterstock.com
Проект осуществлён с помощью технологий
print on demand
16+
Знак информационной продукции согласно
Федеральному закону от 29.12.2010 г. № 436-ФЗ.
Подписано в печать 10.01.2018
Формат 60х90/16
Усл. печ. л. 10,38
Отпечатано: АО «Т8 Издательские Технологии»
109548, г. Москва, Волгоградский проспект, дом 42, корпус 5
www.t8print.ru; info@t8print.ru
Тел.: +7 (499) 322-38-30
Соседние файлы в предмете [НЕСОРТИРОВАННОЕ]